


princess charming

by The_Eclectic_Bookworm



Category: Angel: the Series
Genre: Episode: s02e22 There’s No Place Like Plrtz Glrb, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 17:58:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,754
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15296946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Eclectic_Bookworm/pseuds/The_Eclectic_Bookworm
Summary: A tall, shaking girl dressed in what looked like a glorified potato sack was being led up the steps, and her eyes met Jenny’s in complete and total bemusement.“Hi,” said Jenny, smiling. If your idiot boss wasn’t going to do the saving, odds were you were gonna have to do it yourself.(alternate take on There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb)





	princess charming

**Author's Note:**

> this is set in the same 'verse as _the grieving process,_ but i felt like the link between the two fics was so tiny that i couldn't really make it a series. if i start writing more fics about jenny's adventures with angel investigations i....might make it a series.

“The  _Crebbil,_ ” said Lorne, who was moving so fast through the crowd of people that Jenny had to grab onto his sleeve to keep up, “is when they cut off someone’s _head!”_

“Oh, that’s not good,” said Jenny, “that’s really not good,” then, “Can you slow down? I’m still—” and gestured down to her clunky heels, which were beginning to pinch at her feet.

“Jenny, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times—”

“—save the impractical shoes for parties and the bedroom, yeah, we _get_ it, Lorne,” said Jenny a little snippily, more irritated at herself than at him. She’d been in the supernatural gig for _way_ too long to make amateur mistakes like this one, and it was frustrating that the _one_ time she did, they ended up in a demon dimension and Angel ended up drunk on being a hero. “Do you think he’s actually going to, you know—” She drew her index finger across her throat.

“I’m tryin’ to think positive right now, sugarplum,” said Lorne, who was doing his best to squeeze both him and Jenny through the crowd. It wasn’t really working. “ _Angel!”_

Jenny added her voice to the cacophony of cheers and “bring the crebbil!” “ANGEL,” she shouted, “I AM WEARING THE CLUNKY HEELS AND I AM USING MY TEACHER VOICE, GET DOWN HERE RIGHT NOW AND TALK TO ME!”

“Interesting approach,” said Lorne. “Not sure where it’s gonna get you.”

Jenny managed a terse smile in Lorne’s direction (after all, it wasn’t _his_ fault that their fearless leader was being fearlessly idiotic) and then properly utilized her status as the smallest member of Angel Investigations, squeezing carefully through cheering demons until she’d reached the platform itself. A tall, shaking girl dressed in what looked like a glorified potato sack was being led up the steps, and her eyes met Jenny’s in complete and total bemusement.

“Hi,” said Jenny, smiling. If your idiot boss wasn’t going to do the saving, odds were you were gonna have to do it yourself.

“Jenny, what you’re trying to do is a _phenomenally_ bad idea!” she heard Lorne shout.

“Thanks for the input,” Jenny sang out, clambering onto the platform, “send it to the suggestion box!” Turning, she found herself face-to-face with an utterly bemused Angel, who was holding a battle-axe as if not quite sure what to do with it. “Hey, let me handle this one, okay?” she said brightly. “You do the fighting. Team effort.”

“Jenny,  _what_ are you doing?” Angel asked, sounding more annoyed than anything. His eyes darted from the girl (who was now kneeling with her head on a chopping block) to Lorne’s relatives, who were both scowling at Jenny. “You’re disrupting the Crebbil,” he said with an amusing amount of frustration for someone who Jenny would bet her life savings didn’t even know what the Crebbil was.

“You’re about to kill someone,” she said, irritated. “That’s the _Crebbil.”_

Angel’s eyes widened and he looked helplessly at Lorne’s relatives, as if hoping that they would tell him that Jenny didn’t know what she was talking about. But Lorne’s mom, still staring Jenny down as if planning to put _her_ on the chopping block after potato-sack girl, snapped, “The cow is a runaway. A scavenger. She plunders our food stores. We are honoring you by letting you kill her.”

“Yeah, you handle the angry mob,” said Jenny, and patted Angel on the shoulder, turning gracefully on her heel to cross the platform to the girl. Carefully, she pulled the girl up. “Hi,” she said.

The girl stared at her with wide, starry eyes. “Hi,” she said.

“Jenny—” Angel began, frustrated.

“Will you let this stand, Angel?” shouted Lorne’s cousin from the crowd. “This cow should not be allowed to disrupt—”

“Hey, if you’re calling me that, at least buy me dinner first,” Jenny shot back, tossing an arm around the girl’s shoulder. “Angel, you can hold these guys off, right?”

Angel, who was now looking a little guilty, nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry. Got a little—uh—”

“Thoughtless?”

“You could say that.”

“Punch-drunk on your own glorification?”

“You’ve made your _point,_ Jenny,” said Angel, his words coming out through gritted teeth—not because he was mad at Jenny, more because he was swinging his battle-axe at the demons now rushing the platform. Jenny, who was beginning to wish she’d grabbed a weapon before running up impulsively, did her best to block the girl, but Angel couldn’t exactly hold off all the demons forever—

“Stop!” shouted Lorne.

Angel and Jenny both looked over at him, surprised.

“… _in the naaame of love,”_ Lorne continued, warbling, “ _before you breeeak my heart…”_

All around them, demons began to drop their weapons and fall back to cover their ears. Jenny, noticing a nearby horse, grabbed potato-sack girl’s hand and towed her over to it.

“Wait!” potato-sack girl gasped. “What’s your name?”

“Horse now, talk later,” Jenny gasped, pulling herself awkwardly up into the saddle and tugging the girl up next to her. “Come on!”

“Jenny!” Angel shouted.

“Take care of Lorne, I’ll be back!” Jenny yelled, spurring the horse on with her now-very-useful clunky heels. She felt the girl’s arms tighten around her waist, and added a little belatedly, “Once I, uh, figure out how to steer this thing.”

 

* * *

 

 

Horses, as it happened, weren’t _too_ difficult to figure out, particularly when Jenny’s primary goal was to get away from the demons and she didn’t have an exact destination in mind. After a good ten minutes of riding, she decided that this was a good place to stop, then realized that she wasn’t really sure how to stop a horse. “Stop,” she said to it, which didn’t work.

“Pull on the—the things,” said potato-sack girl in her ear.

Jenny pulled on the reins, then tried to gracefully hop off the horse. Potato-sack girl, however, was still holding tightly to her waist, which added some extra complications in the form of extra weight, and next thing Jenny knew they had both fallen off the horse, potato-sack girl’s head on her chest. It didn’t at _all_ help that they were on an incline, which sent both of them tumbling, Jenny’s arm wrapped awkwardly around potato-sack girl’s waist in a futile attempt to steady her at least a little.

They stopped as the terrain flattened out, in a grassier, less rocky region, now with Jenny lying on top of potato-sack girl. She tried to pull back, but potato-sack girl was still holding onto her very tightly. “Um, first of all, ow,” said Jenny, gently tugging herself back to sit next to potato-sack girl, “and second—are you okay?”

Potato-sack girl blinked at her, the corners of her mouth trembling. “You saved me,” she said. “You saved me from the monsters.”

“Honestly, I feel like it was more of a team effort,” Jenny began, then considered the matter a little more thoroughly. “You know what? Yeah. I did. How are you doing?”

Potato-sack girl seemed to seriously consider the question for a brief moment, and then jumped to her feet, dashing into the wilderness.

“Hey!” Jenny called, indignant. “That is _so_ not fair play!” Infuriated, she kicked off her shoes, then took off after potato-sack girl, pushing her now-messy hair out of her face because of fucking  _course_ she’d chosen to grow her hair out _now._ She missed her days of short hair and easy-stepping shoes, but—missing those days led to missing other things that she hadn’t thought about in a very long time. Stumbling a little, rocks and dry grass pricking at her bare feet, she followed potato-sack girl through a wooded area, past a boulder, and into—a cave. A cave, its walls engraved with symbols that looked almost like—

“Equations,” said Jenny softly, admiringly, forgetting her irritation. Stepping all the way into the cave, she ran her fingers along the carefully-scratched numbers and lines. “These are…beautiful.”

The sound of potato-sack girl’s scratching on the wall stopped very abruptly. A tentative second passed before she turned to look at Jenny. “You think so?” she asked, timid.

“I was a computer science teacher, for a while,” said Jenny, smiling at the meticulous nature of a particular set of variables next to her. “I always appreciate someone who shows their work.”

Potato-sack girl stood up, looking at Jenny, her mouth trembling. “You can’t be real,” she said. “You’re so—”

“Messy?”

“Beautiful,” said potato-sack girl, a sigh in her voice. “You’re like some kind of princess come to save me.”

Belatedly, Jenny remembered that this was the day she’d chosen to wear not only the clunky heels, but the long dress. “Princesses don’t usually wear leather jackets,” she quipped, taking a careful step towards potato-sack girl.

“Oh, I’m of the mind that the best kinds do,” said potato-sack girl earnestly, and smiled—a smile that was gone as quickly as it had arrived. “But you can’t be real.”

“Why not?”

“I was—I should be dead, right now,” said potato-sack girl, her voice breaking a little. “Nothing but bad things happen in this place—no princess comes out of the blue and whisks me away on a steed.”

“You know, I’ve always been of the mind that we make our own luck,” said Jenny conversationally. “Saying that _nothing but bad_ can exist in a place—I feel like that’s a little limiting, don’t you? You’re a mathematician—”

“Physicist,” the girl corrected.

“Physicist—then you should know even _better_ how theoretical and whimsical the universe can be,” said Jenny with a fierce, enthusiastic passion. “You should know that my saving you really was just one of many random acts of chance that led us both here to this cave.”

“Um, I led us both here,” said the girl.

“I could have chosen not to follow,” Jenny pointed out.

The girl smiled again, this one quivery but still lingering. “I’m not dead?” she asked.

“No,” said Jenny, taking two more steps to sit down next to her.

“You’re real?”

“I like to think so,” said Jenny, smiling gently.

The girl’s smile widened into something almost blindingly bright, and she adjusted a pair of crooked glasses that Jenny hadn’t noticed she’d been wearing. “Fred,” she said.

“I’m sorry?”

“I’m, I’m Fred,” said the girl. “I’m from—another world, I think. I hope.”

“Fred?” Jenny echoed, and then it clicked. “Fred—physicist—you’re the girl from Cordelia’s vision!”

“What?”

“Long story,” said Jenny, who was beginning to feel a little wrung-out. “What I can say pretty definitively is that we’re from the same world, and that my friends and I are working on a way to get back.”

Fred blinked, her expression becoming blank and defeated. “Can’t go back,” she said. “There is no back.”

Jenny considered this, then moved forward, taking Fred’s hands carefully in hers. “Were I a princess,” she said quietly, “would you follow me?”

“I’ll follow you even if you’re not,” said Fred helplessly. “Anywhere’s better than—than this cave, this _cage._ ” Her voice caught on a sob, and her head dropped, her glasses falling to the ground in between them as she moved to cover her face with her hands.

Gently, Jenny tugged Fred’s hands away. “My name is Jenny,” she said, “and I’m here to rescue you. Now let’s go find my friends.”

 

* * *

 

 

A lot of things happened after that—messy, and scary, and a lot of threats were made—but Fred stuck by Jenny’s side like glue, wide-eyed and panicked even through the fighting. A lot of things happened, and at the end of it all, Jenny snuck off by herself to take a long and well-deserved bubble bath in one of the fancy palace bathrooms before they headed for home. Her dress was torn, and her leather jacket had a long slash down the back (from the swords, she supposed—Jenny Calendar, always one for close calls), and it felt comforting and freeing to discard them and clamber into magically warmed water. She might only be a technopagan, but she was still _some_ kind of a witch.

There was a knock on the bathroom door.

“Come in,” Jenny called; she’d never been one for modesty, and it was always hilarious to see Angel and Wesley fall all over themselves blushing. To her surprise, it was a nervous Fred who peered around and into the bathroom. “Oh! Hi.”

“Oh, are you—I should go,” Fred stammered.

“No, it’s okay,” said Jenny, lying back in the tub and letting her hair spill outward on the water. “I’m not doing much, and the bubbles are doing _wonders_ to keep me covered. What’s up?”

Fred took another step in, her eyes fluttering across the tub and then to Jenny’s face. She was still wearing the potato sack thing and looking somewhat dusty. “I—” She seemed almost unable to speak, her cheeks heated.

“Is this a conversation that we should be having fully clothed?” Jenny asked, turning her head so that her cheek lay on the surface of the water.

Still blushing, Fred nodded.

“Do you need to take a bath?”

Fred nodded again.

“Give me a minute and I’ll set one up for you,” said Jenny, then, more gently, “I’d imagine you’re not exactly one for being alone.”

“I-I’m not,” said Fred, faltering. “Not really.”

She reminded Jenny of Willow, ever so slightly—the stammering, the sweet hesitance—and it was perhaps that that made Jenny warm to her even more. “I’m really just soaking, now,” she said. “You mind turning away while I grab a robe?”

“Of course,” Fred squeaked, and covered her eyes, all but jumping to turn her back to Jenny.

Carefully, Jenny stepped out of the tub, leaning down to pick up the neatly folded, pleasantly fluffy robe she’d found among a heap of linens while exploring the palace. Donning it, she gently tapped on Fred’s shoulder. “I’m decent,” she quipped. “Let me just get the water ready for you.”

“Oh, I can—”

“I’ve got a little magic in me,” said Jenny playfully. “I can make the water a little warmer, and I think you’d like that a little better, right?”

Fred was now looking at her with a wide-eyed scientific curiosity that spoke to something deep in Jenny’s soul. Wordlessly, she nodded, then began to strip out of the potato sack.

“Oh, hey, let’s keep our clothes on for now,” said Jenny hastily, taking Fred’s hands in hers. “I’ll cast a little spell on the water, then go look for fresh linens while you get into the bath, how’s that?”

“You’re a witch?” Fred sounded a mixture of impressed and—smitten, if Jenny’s ego wasn’t playing tricks on her. Well. She was a sweet kid, but she was a _kid,_ and Jenny was going to have to let her down gently.

“Technopagan,” Jenny corrected, squeezing Fred’s hands. “Let me get that water for you.”

“Techno-pagan,” said Fred, trying out the word as Jenny turned back to the tub. “Tech-no-pa-gan. I don’t think I’ve heard that word before, at least not used the way you use it.”

“I’m sort of witchcraft’s nerdy cousin,” said Jenny, laughing. “A lot of what I’ve been doing lately is experimenting with the intersection of magic and science, and how those two things can coexist—plus, of course, tech. That was where I got started.”

“What do you mean, where you got started?”

Jenny felt her smile fade a little. “I met someone,” she said. “Made me think about what else I could do all by myself.”

Fred’s voice was soft when she spoke next. “Meeting someone doesn’t generally make people think about flying solo,” she said quietly. “Guessin’ that someone you met isn’t around anymore.”

“Yeah,” said Jenny simply.

“A princess with a tragic past,” said Fred wonderingly.

“I think I’m more of a sorceress,” Jenny corrected, smiling despite herself. “Or a spy.”

“No—you wouldn’t make a good spy,” said Fred decisively. “You aren’t all that good at lying.”

This was more true than Fred could know. Jenny finished filling the tub again, then whispered a few words in Latin to heat it and a few words in English to add some bubbles—a perfect blend of old theory and new was what Jenny had always known best. “I’m going to get you a fluffy robe,” she said, turning to Fred. “You get into that tub, okay?”

Fred’s smile blossomed, soft, bright, and beautifully unafraid. _This is a good kid,_ Jenny thought with conviction. _I’m going to take care of this kid._


End file.
